Brief hiatus

I just wanted to post a note letting everyone know that I’m receiving and reading e-mails and comments posted to this weblog. I’ve been incommunicado due to my academic responsibilities for the quarter. I plan on replying to the messages I’ve received and releasing updates as soon as the chaos abates.

Thanks for your patience.

Posted by Chris Karr on April 29th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Books & Italian Quickfill

I promised some users via e-mail several weeks ago that I’d attempt to craft a Quickfill plugin for bol.it. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon investigating a potential way of obtaining the information using Adrian Holovaty’s templatemaker Python library.

Unfortunately, I was unable to get this to work, due largely to the messy nature of the bol.it web pages. The pages and URL schemes are not nearly consistent enough for me to write a plugin, so I am going to have to give up on this endeavor at the moment. If you’re an Italian user and wish to use bol.it as a Quickfill source, please write them and ask them to implement an XML version of their site that may be read by machines.

In the meantime, I realize that the SBN plugin is giving Italian users problems (again), so if there are particular books that SBN is not picking up (and it should), please post the ISBN numbers and titles in the comments below.

I wished that this could have worked out otherwise, but I don’t have a week to craft a plugin that conforms to bol.it’s web pages. (It would probably break as soon as they updated the site in any case.) If there are any Italian developers that would like to try and craft this plugin, I’m happy to provide advice and support.

One final idea - Italian users who wish for a bol.it plugin can make a donation to the Books project and leave me a note saying that the funds are intended for the bol.it plugin. I’m happy to hold that money as a bounty for an Italian developer who wishes to claim the money by implementing the plugin. If this idea is interesting to either developers or users, please post a comment below in support of the idea. If there’s enough support, I can make a more formal announcement and arrangement.

Posted by Chris Karr on April 14th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Genres v. Keywords

When I implemented the current version of the Books Amazon plugins, I decided to place the values that Amazon calls “Browse Nodes” into the Keywords field instead of the Genres field. I did this because there could be as many as twenty browse nodes, with some encapsulating each other (e.g. “US History”, “The Civil War”, “The Battle of Gettysburg”).

I’ve received a few comments about this and wanted some feedback. Should I place these values in the Genre field instead? From my perspective, you probably only want a few genres for a book, but many keywords. However, I’m not wed to this view and am willing to implement the alternative if desired.

(For those curious, there used to be a Genre field in the Amazon output, but no longer.)

Posted by Chris Karr on April 10th, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Duplicate Amazon plugins?

First of all, thanks to everyone testing the Amazon plugins some weeks ago.

If you’re in the situation that you have duplicate plugins after installing Books 3.1.8, delete the Amazon plugins in the

Library/Application Support/Books/Plugins

folder under your home directory and restart Books to get everything back in non-duplicate order.

Posted by Chris Karr on April 10th, 2008 | No Comments »

Books 3.1.8

Books 3.1.8 is now available.

This is a minor update that includes the new Amazon ECS4 plugins as part of the standard distribution. (The old plugins have been removed.) Please note that Amazon will be shutting down the previous versions of the book lookup service on March 31. This means that the old Amazon plugins (as well as prior versions of Books, such as 1.x and 2.x) will no longer be able to retrieve information via Quickfill.

As always, post any comments or bug reports in the comments below or send an e-mail to books@aetherial.net.

Posted by Chris Karr on March 28th, 2008 | 6 Comments »

Help me test the new Amazon plugins

I just finished writing and testing the new ECS4 Amazon plugins that I hope to bundle with the next release of Books. However, before I include them with the default distribution (and abandon the old ones), I’d like some assistance testing them. The plugins can be downloaded in a zip file here.

To install them, uncompress the file and copy the .plugin files to

~/Library/Application Support/Books/Plugins

and start Books. You should be able to find books in the US, UK, CA, FR, DE, and JP locales using these new plugins. (The included JP plugin replaces the previous ECS4 JP plugin.)

Please give them a spin and let me know if you run into any problems. If the new plugins are missing some fields, please let me know that too. Things change between versions of the Amazon API and I want to be sure that I capture everything.

Thanks in advance!

Posted by Chris Karr on March 8th, 2008 | 6 Comments »

Books 3.1.8b

Books 3.1.8b is now available.

This is a test release that includes some potential fixes for recent crashing problems and implements an optional alternative data storage location. If you’d like to change where Books places its files, run the following command from the Terminal:

write net.aetherial.books.Books "Books Data Folder" "/my/new/location"

Replace /my/new/location with an alternative path such as /Users/my-username/Desktop/Books Data.

Some notes/warnings about this feature:

1. I will not be implementing this as a general preference. This should only be done by those of you who know what you’re doing. If the Terminal command is too difficult, you probably shouldn’t be trying this out.

2. You can store your Books data on networked drives, but the performance of Books will suffer. In particular, I expect that start-ups will be orders of magnitudes slower as will saving and quitting.

3. Only one instance of Books should access the file at any given time. Running two instances of Books on the same data file concurrently will probably result in data loss.

4. You’ll need to copy/move the folder at “~/Library/Application Support/Books” to the new location specified in the command above unless you want to start over with a fresh library. The old files at the old location will not be modified or deleted by Books.

That said, those of you who requested this feature, please let me know if this works for you. This is a test release, so if you notice anything odd, please let me know so that I can fix it for the more general release. It also goes without saying that this release should not be installed by those of you not interested in the crash fixes or alternate data locations. There are no other new features. Also, please don’t submit this to MacUpdate or any of the other software listing sites since I do not want this version distributed to the more general audience (yet).

As always, post any comments or bug reports in the comments below or send an e-mail to books@aetherial.net.

Posted by Chris Karr on March 7th, 2008 | No Comments »

Thank You

I wanted to thank everyone out there who’s been generous enough to donate to the Books project over the past couple of years. I’ve been squirreling away donations into a separate Audacious Software account for purchasing hardware, software, and educational resources to support the Books project.Late last year, some of your donations went towards helping Enrico Richter (the Books translation manager) purchase a license for Leopard so that localized versions of Books could remain supported on the new operating system release.

I’ve also been saving money for purchasing several variety of electronic book readers for testing with the Books 4 release.Earlier today, Apple announced the SDK for the iPhone and a $99 registration fee for creating applications for the device. Moving forward, I plan on including the iPhone and iPod Touch in my general Books strategy, so some of the money donated will used to purchase a registration certificate for the iPhone SDK. In plain English, this means that I’ll be able to write and distribute Books-related software on these platforms. (I’m hesitant to commit to full port of Books to the iPhone, but it’s something that I’m seriously considering!)

When I gave up a regular paying job to return to graduate school, I took a large cut in my monthly income. Things are tight and in the absence of your generous donations, I would not have been able to help Enrico purchase Leopard, nor would I be able to move Books into the iPhone era. So, thank you for your donations and continued support of the Books project.

PS. If you’d like to make a donation to the Books project, check out the donation page or bookmark the Books Amazon referral link for new purchases books, music, or other goods that Amazon sells.

Posted by Chris Karr on March 6th, 2008 | Comments Off

Amazon updates to impact Books

Over the last week, I received a message from Amazon stating:

“We are writing to remind you that the Amazon E-Commerce Web Service 3.0 will be deprecated on March 31st, 2008.”

This means that the older versions of the Amazon APIs will probably be shut down in the next month and code using those APIs will cease to work.

What this means for Books users:

Books 3.x users: I plan to update all of the Amazon plugins with some of the new ECS4 code that I’ve already written. (The Japanese exporter already uses ECS4, and I have an experimental US one in the works.) I’ll push out these plugin updates in a release of Books over the next few weeks.

Books 1.x & 2.x users: This Amazon update will break Amazon-based quickfills on these earlier versions of Books. Since I don’t have the time to support multiple versions of Books, I have no plans to update the code to fix this. Enrico is the caretaker of the Books 2.x line, so any updates to that version will be done at his sole discretion. The source code to these versions is available, so if you’d like to patch it yourself, you have my blessing. (E-mail me if you have trouble locating the files.)

I apologize in advance to any users who will be adversely affected by this change, but Amazon’s decision is out of my control.

Posted by Chris Karr on March 2nd, 2008 | No Comments »

Test fix for startup problems

A variety of users have reported me that Books 3.1.7 is having problems starting up. This doesn’t seem to be a widespread problem, but I’ve received enough reports to be convinced that it’s not a typical odd local system configuration issue.

I have a test fix online here. I don’t know if this fixes the problem completely, but after some modifications, I’ve been unable to replicate the problems.

Let me know if this corrects the issue on your local machines.

Posted by Chris Karr on February 25th, 2008 | 5 Comments »